Upholstered furniture intended to provide better sleep and rest, especially furniture for disabled persons, require careful design of elastic spring systems. In the majority of cases, when designing new articles, both furniture designers and manufacturers rely on long-term experience and craftsman’s intuition. On the other hand, the accumulated interdisciplinary knowledge of modern medical labo...

6.1 Chapter Summary In continuing efforts to understand urea phase connectivity in flexible polyurethane foams and its implications on physical properties, LiCl is used to alter the phase-separation behavior of slabstock foams. Comparisons are also drawn with plaque counterparts, which are prepared using the same polyol, isocyanate, and chain extender (water). LiCl is shown to alter the solid-s...

Shape memory polymers (SMP) are lightweight, have a high strain/shape recovery ability, are easy to process, and required properties can be tailored for variety of applications. Recently a number of medical applications have been considered and investigated, especially for polyurethane-based SMP. SMP materials were found to be biocompatible, non-toxic and non-mutagenic. The glass transition tem...

Pull out tests for bone anchors used in surgical robotics were performed to prove the strength of the bone anchor -bone combination. Forces and displacement were measured to evaluate the suitability of the bone anchors as a connection between a surgical robot and bone. A universal experimental setup was designed to conduct the pull out tests. As specimens, human cranial cadaver bone, porcine ca...

New organic-inorganic polyurethane-based hybrids with enhanced mechanical properties and thermal insulation are reported. Polyurethane-based characterized by the intimate interactions of their inorganic organic co-networks prepared sol-gel approach, have exhibited exceeding those polyurethane foams, e.g. stability, durability insulating effectiveness. However, previously been poor. Here, new po...

The literature on rigid polyurethane foam has been reviewed with an emphasis on the gaseous products generated under various thermal decomposition conditions and the toxicity of those products. This review is limited to publications in English through 1984. Carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrogen cyanide (HCN) were the predominant toxicants found among more than a hundred other gaseous products. The ...

Abstract Nanofiller reinforcing agents can significantly improve the strength and modulus of polymer foams. But these improvements are often accompanied by changes in foam density (or equivalently the expansion ratio or void volume). The efficacy of nanofillers as reinforcing agents can only be judged once the density differences are accounted for. We review the literature and show that represe...

Flexible and semi-rigid polyurethane foams have been widely used in automotive interior parts, residential upholstered furniture and bedding. In these, as well as other end use industries, a reduction of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) emissions from polyurethane foams continues to be an important issue [1, 2]. To address this challenge, reactive amine catalysts, which have an active hydrogen...